My academic year has four seasons: the relative relaxed time of post-EGU, the slow build up of pre-AGU, the brief relief of post-AGU before the hectic period of pre-EGU. EGU and AGU are the main scientific conferences in the geo-sciences. EGU, or: the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, is organised in April in Vienna. AGU, the American Geosciences Union Fall Meeting, in december in San Francisco.
If you see any correlation with my work being in the media, that is no coincidence. Sensor-umbrella's last year April, Alcatraz-escapees last december, all of it presented at either EGU or AGU. At those conferences, together with some friends, I organise the so-called "MacGyver" sessions. The official title for our session is "Innovative techniques and unintended use of measurement equipment".
Last week was EGU, today is the first day of post-EGU. Our session last Tuesday was great: a lot of other scientist came to watch and discuss our work. Three of the posters presented at the session made it on the news.
Dirk Eilander, flood expert at Deltares, made flood maps by looking at Twitter. Using the geo-location of tweets, Dirk could identify the flood extend during a major flood in Jakarta. An automated system that can identify floods really quickly will help authorities to respond to the onset of floods much quicker than they can currently.
My own work on equipping waders with temperature sensors got covered by the BBC. As someone on twitter mentioned: this must have been the first time ever that the word hyporheic made it on the BBC.
Nils Michelson, from TU Darmstad in Germany, is studying water movement in a cave in Saudi Arabia. Since he does not have a lot of data to work with, he turned to the internet and found: youtube. Apparently locals use the water in the cave to swim in. And make selfies and videos of themselves! By cleverly looking at a piece of graffiti as "anchor" he could calculate the water levels on different dates from youtube videos. I loved it, and so did the internet: his story went viral after (again) the BBC covered it.
Next to those three, there were fifteen more interesting posters in our session, of which three I want to specifically mention. My colleague from Delft Peter Jules van Overloop, who tragically passed away two months ago, had the philosophy that we should not install expensive smart sensors in systems where people are already walking around with expensive smart sensors: smartphones. He developed different techniques to measure water related information using only a smartphone. He started a company to bring this technology to market: Mobile Water Management. In our session, three applications of his technology were demonstrated. Using the sound in your phone, kind of like a bat, to measure groundwater level. Using a phone to read the position of a tilting weir gage, and using a phone to determine water quality in streams. Really cool technology that, in my opinion, will make a big difference in the years to come.
Finally, something not from my session. I like to communicate my science with a broad audience and take effort to do so effectively. I write on this blog, but also give presentation like "5 experiments in 5 minutes" to encourage other scientist to do experiments with kids. I thought I was pretty "out of the box" in that respect. Until I met Sam. Samual Illingworth is a scientist and a poet. He turns papers into poems. I got him to read for us at the final endparty of EGU last week, see below and enjoy.